Unlike me, Rocky is Australian born and bred. It may well be that his ancestors first came to Australia long ago but I cannot be sure how long ago that might be. He was born in an outer suburb of Melbourne, somewhere not far from Bulleen where he was found in a pet shop by my children who decided, as soon as they saw him, despite our agreement that we would first check the dog shelters before any final decision was made, that Rocky was made for us. They were told that he was a low-shedding dog, part Poodle and part King Charles Terrier. This was in large part untrue. There is nothing about him that I can see to suggest that his ancestors were French and English. If anything, he looks to me to have German ancestry, for what I see when I look at him is the bearded old man look of a Schnauzer. Except Rocky is softer looking, more handsome. This, I assume, is due to the fact that he is ultimately a mutt. Who sheds quite a bit.
Rocky may be Australian born and his ancestors going back generations may have been Aussies as well, but like me, though I was born in a post-war displaced persons camp in Austria, his ancestry, by which I mean the dogs from which he came, male and female, going back beyond his birth mother and perhaps father, are unknown and will remain unknown forever. Rocky, on the evidence available to me, just observing his temperament and disposition, does not fret too much about any of this.
I am unable to be quite as sanguine as Rocky about my lack of ancestral knowledge. Who were they, my grandparents and great grandparents? Twenty five years ago, when I was in Israel, in a hotel in Tel Aviv, in the dining hall where I was enjoying an Israeli breakfast of pickled herring, schmaltz herring, olives, pickled turnips, pickled cucumbers, humus and tahina, there was suddenly a message over the loudspeakers asking someone called Gawenda to come to the reception desk. I left my plate of herring and falafal and olives and pickled turnip and rushed over to meet this possible relative. I met a middle- aged woman who told me she was a Gawenda from Lodz, now an American, and that the Gawenda family had been famous for being the best fishmongers in all of Jewish Poland.
I tried to hide my disappointment, in part because I thought it highly unlikely that the Gawendas, my Gawendas, could have been fishmongers. Looking back, I am no longer so sure. I think my disappointment was mainly due to the fact that I had been hoping to discover that my ancestors had been rabbis and later, rabbis who became revolutionaries. Fishmongers, even fishmongers of renown, was not exactly what I had been looking to hear when the old lady told me she had known about my father and grandfather and assorted aunts and uncles.
Whoever they were, my ancestors had no connection with Australia. I am part of an ethnic minority and for many people, this defines who I am. I do not want to be so defined. I fear however, that I might soon have no option but to accept that I am a Jew and that is the end of my story. This because we are living, we are told by many people who know about such things, in a post-nation state, globalised world. In this world, what matters and defines you are your religious, ethnic, gender and narrow cultural affiliations. In this world, there are many identity narratives and each narrative is as authentic as the next one.
There are good and bad consequences of this. Among the good ones is that some people who were once voiceless are finding a voice. They increasingly speak for themselves and by that I mean in the narrow sense of what it means to be part of a powerless–and in the case of indigenous Australians, oppressed–minority. Among the troubling consequences is the belief that the narrative of indigenous Australians–or Muslim Australians for instance– cannot be understood and therefore cannot be challenged, by`outsiders’ . This diminishes some of the most original and powerful and talented people in Australia.
Noel Pearson is the best political and social essayist in the country. Read his book Up From The Mission which is a collection of speeches and essays and newspaper commentaries and it is clear that Pearson is a writer and thinker –and orator, an orator unequalled by any of our politicians– who should not be considered simply as an indigenous leader with controversial views about the future of Aboriginal Australians. That is to seriously diminish him. It is significant that many Aboriginal leaders vehemently reject Pearson’s views, but that cannot be the end of the story and it does not negate his talent and thought. Nor should non indigenous Australians feel constrained to engage Pearson, argue with him, disagree with him, and honor him as an Australian writer of great talent and intelligence if they feel so inclined.
It is an insidious thing, identity politics. For thirty years as a journalist, I do not recall ever thinking –or being regarded by those readers who responded to my reporting– that I was a jewish journalist, by which I mean that the work I did, the views I held, the stories I wrote, were determined and defined by the fact that I was a Jew. Of course my history and even my unknown ancestors, influenced the sort of journalism I was most interested in, but the bald fact of my being jewish is meaningless, unless of course you are into racial and ethnic stereotypes.
For the last ten years or so of my previous life, when I was an editor and later, when I was based in Washington–and certainly when I covered the 2006 Israeli election–the fact that I was a Jew seemed to exercise the minds of quite a few people, including the then editor of The Age, who suggested–tentatively I admit– that perhaps the fact of my being a Jew meant that my reporting from Israel may seem, to some readers, tainted. Looking back, I think it probably was so tainted for some readers.
There are people who believe that Jews who are vehement critics of Israel, especially those who reckon Israel has no future as a jewish state, somehow have something important and profound to say about Israel and the Palestinians because they are Jews. On the other hand, Jews who are not so critical of Israel are not so critical because of course they wouldn’t be: they are, after all, Jews. This is not of course just about Jews. There are people who would reckon that first and foremost, when it comes to Noel Pearson, it is his Aboriginality that is important and not so much his talent and originality and wonderful writing.
Most of the time, like Rocky, I am not much concerned about my ancestors. When people ask me about Rocky’s antecedents, I am quite happy to call him a mutt and as far as I can tell, Rocky is unperturbed by this, happy to receive attention from anyone, no matter what their breeding, and he is not in the slightest embarrassed by his own lack of it. On the beach in St Kilda, on the streets around where we have lived on and off for thirty five years, in my memories of the milk bar and grocery shop where my mother and father worked hard—well my mother anyway—to make some money, even to get rich if possible, in the childhood fantasies that I can still recall, of long gone school friends and the games we played in the lanes—marbles and cowboys and Indians and footy and hoppo bumpo and cricket, the wicket a cardboard box propped up against the tin gate of the textile factory—in all that and more is my narrative and it is a narrative with no ethnic or religious or even an easily defined cultural base, though for the first four years of my life I spoke only Yiddish and even now I sometimes think that I write like a Yid.
A few years ago, when I was still at The Age, I met one of the cleaners in the canteen. He had smiled at me a few times when I had seen him around the building, especially the editorial floor, but I had taken this smiling to be casual friendliness. But this time, in the canteen, as I stood behind him in the queue, I looked at him and his smile and it dawned on me suddenly, with a rush, that this was George, my best friend from George Street State School in Fitzroy. I used to pine for George during school holidays when I think he went off with his parents to the beach somewhere on the Mornington Peninsular. George and I used to heat hacksaw blades in his kitchen when his parents were at work and run the blades through our hair in order to make it curl. The serrated edge of the blades tore out a fair amount of hair, but we did manage a few curls.
I remember many things about George, but what I remember best is his first day at school, a Greek boy who couldn’t speak a word of English. The teacher asked whether there was anyone in the class who could speak Greek. My hand shot up and I was called to the front of the class and I spoke to George in Yiddish and he answered in Greek. We seemed somehow to understand each other. I loved George straight away, perhaps because he made it seem, that morning, that what I had done was perfectly understandable, at least to him.
We talked in the canteen, George and I, awkwardly, for we had not seen each other for forty years, about our families and our time in Fitzroy. George had a broad Australian accent, more broad than mine, for he was a working man and had been a working man all his life. Even though we clearly had little in common, we shared a common past and a common language. We learnt that language and lived that past not in a village in Greece or in a shtetl in Poland but on the streets of working class Fitzroy.
